In legislatures elected by proportional representation systems, parties tend to form around particular ideological orientations and undergo a mix-and-match process of alignment and coalition-buiding in the assembly of governments and oppositions.
First-past-the-post systems, on the other hand, reward big-tent parties, which internalize the assembly of coalition-building within party ranks.
An obvious example is today's Conservative Party here in Canada. It is the formal product of a hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservatives by the Canadian Alliance/Reform Party formation.
There appears to be a tendency in post-industrial first-past-the-post legislatures to gravitate toward versions of the U.S.-style binary party system. In this system, we have one party which is a centrist co-optation of the social-democratic left (in the U.S., the Democrats; in the U.K., New Labour). The other is a right-wing co-optation of the centre (in the U.S., the Republicans; in the UK, the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition).
Canada has already seen a Republican-style consolidation of the centre-right under right-wing domination in our present Conservative Party. We may witness a corresponding centrist-dominated consolidation of the centre-left, in the form of some kind of amalgamation of the Liberal Party with the New Democratic Party.
Transforming the Liberals and NDP into a Canadian version of the Democrats has been talked up extensively in the background by Elders of both parties (Chretien, Broadbent). In the face of the Harperite triumph over a divided opposition vote in the May 2011 general election, we can expect this chatter to rise in intensity. If former Ontario NDP-leader Bob Rae, for instance, becomes the new Liberal leader (even on an interim basis), we should expect real momentum behind this push.
What are the pros and cons? It all depends on what you think is important.
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A centre-left consolidation would tend to push the Conservatives out of their new position as the putative NGP ("Natural Governing Party") and would tend to ensure that the centre-left would at least enjoy regular turns at governing. From an electoral strategy standpoint in the near and medium term, if the objective is to defeat the Harper Conservatives, the case is pretty compelling -- as is evidenced by the results on May 2.
The price, for the left, would be a submergence and marginalization of the social-democratric thrust in Canadian politics. The logic of winning elections in the short term already exerts enormous pressure on social democracy to shift rightwards; a formal merger with a centrist Liberal Party would likely consign what is now the left within the NDP to the same kind of insignificance as that suffered by social democracy within the U.S. Democratic Party. It would recruit the left to contribute energy and money to elect centrist governments to defeat the farther-right alternative.
So here's the dilemma: do we think that the Harper government represents a sufficiently dire threat to our society and our values, for us to sacrifice the road to a social-democratic alternative? It's easy to pose the question rhetorically to make the answer self-evident. Living under the heel of New Conservatism may present the question in a more complex light.
